This short peek into my practice and the organization’s work is just to show a work in progress and a shout-out to other organizations working with similar topics. It is also a call to action to team up with young people in the transition to a sustainable building sector and to include them early on as they are future users and practitioners.
This last decade of my professional career has been dedicated to sparking and strengthening positive relationships between young people and their environments. Ten years ago it was mostly through traditional environmental education. I created moments of wonder, joy, and discovery so that sometimes, these somewhat nature-estranged young people would hopefully become future nature caretakers, conservationists, sustainable consumers, and comrades in the transition to come. I facilitated moments of natural connection, where they could touch a beaver skull, walk through a mud hole, or eat nettles that we gathered together; a short impulse of the other-than-human pressed into their otherwise indoor formal education. With my move from Switzerland to Sweden, from a peri-urban nature-conservation area right into the heart of the regional capital city of Malmö (where natural phenomena are rare at first glance and forests or wetlands far away), my focus shifted towards the built qualities of these new urban environments and the spaces in-between: the forgotten feral corners of the human-made landscapes. Instead of observation, my methods increasingly moved towards analysis, exploration, and co-creation.
You can call it placemaking, participatory design, or architecture pedagogy. In the end, it often culminates in me, a colleague, and a group of 10-year-olds all knee-deep in tools and materials working against the clock to build whatever their fantastic young minds come up with. If there is one thing I learned throughout, it is that young people have an innate desire to discuss, improve, and influence their physical surroundings. They want to leave a mark by their own hands. Young people are often excluded and removed from public spaces, urban environments, and planning processes. Creating a situation where they are asked and get an opportunity to take charge and carve out some nook for themselves is not only important and morally right, but it is also fascinating, humbling, and professionally satisfying.
This sort of physical transformation is an aspect alien to the natural, protected landscapes of my early career, where distance, separation, and observation were at the core of the human-nature interactions I induced. The potential for change and transformation seems to be an inherent trait of more urban spaces. Things that are man-made can be re- made, together with children.
And here this short text could end: appealing to architects and builders to include young people and let them join in any meaningful way possible that addresses our built environments. But, sometime in my late teens, I got an unhealthy obsession with “the coming collapse,” or what we maybe nowadays would call deep adaptation, which led me to a weird amount of literature about permaculture, bushcraft, and natural building. Natural building has slowly become a relevant topic for my work, a topic that ties together environmental education, urban space, and participatory design with youth. Natural building + participatory design + children = Amazing. Simple as that.
Scandinavian architecture is now reinventing itself, and the inclusion of biogenic materials is an important pillar of this process in the labs of architecture and engineering PhDs and the testing facilities of big construction companies. I’m convinced that young people should be included from the start in this transition. They are the architects and builders of tomorrow. Formal education might need some years to catch up to anchor these new ideas in their curriculum. I am working towards including more and more natural materials in my and my organization’s projects and activities for multiple other reasons.
Applications for Swedish grants and funds (where a lot of our money comes from) nowadays almost always need descriptions about how the projects aid the national Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or other climate adaptation aspects. Natural building materials cover these questions excellently. They can embody localized logistics and a circular economy if they come from a nearby source, or integrate agricultural waste which is a big topic in itself. They are more socially sustainable as they can bring together people and work collectively if one uses more human labor as we do in our co-creative processes. Not much can stop a 10-year-old from digging for hours on end once they start. Smaller designs are perfectly fit for the exploration of new materials with the participants. Building a sitting bench with rammed earth doesn’t require the same soil mix properties that building a 3m high load-bearing wall does. Many such materials can be gathered or scavenged: even in urban areas, we can find almost everything needed with some patience, connections, and good transportation. This can be an important aspect with tight material budgets as is often the case for our pedagogical projects. The budget can go towards the raw materials, rather than screws, bits, or tools, allowing us to create in bigger dimensions. When you work with wood with 10-year-olds, there is no scenario where you don’t need at least four to five of the same tool to not get into all-out fights about who gets to screw the next screw. If you instead work with cob or other materials, there is enough for everyone to work at the same time, and the technical requirements are often less expensive. Much can be done with buckets gathered from the local falafel place (a Malmö classic) or tarps that lay around in our garages. Also, you need much less electricity and batteries to charge (or forget to charge).
With our methods of co-design, we are trying to create a temporary democratic space working towards flattening hierarchies, where the children’s ideas are taken seriously. And while our projects with wood work well, prototypes with natural materials seem to increase the inclusion and participation of our young builders. Working with natural materials is often more intuitive, and haptic as one can directly work with the materials with their bare hands or simple hand tools. Intellectual differences, language barriers, or technical intelligence, while still relevant, seem to dissipate somewhat as the children can use their whole bodies and engage with the materials easily by observing us and each other. The simplicity of it also allows us to work better with children with different forms of disabilities.
